8 ways to visualize financial market data
Bring clarity to complex financial data with interactive data visualizations
In today’s fast-paced financial landscape, understanding and interpreting data swiftly and accurately is paramount. Being able to visualize financial data not only enhances comprehension but also facilitates better decision-making.
We all know traditional financial reports and spreadsheets are often dense and overwhelming. But they don’t have to be! Data visualization provides a more intuitive and accessible way to grasp complex financial concepts.
In this blog post, we’ll cover key templates to bring your financial data to life and demonstrate how Flourish can revolutionize financial data visualization.
Elevate standard line charts with stories and annotations
Let’s kick off with line charts. They’re your go-to when you want to see how things change over time.
Whether it’s stock prices or revenue growth, line charts make it easy to spot long-term trends and patterns. The best part? They’re simple and straightforward. Even complex data becomes easy to digest.
In the chart below, we have visualized the 10-year government bond yields of Italy and Germany, spanning 25 years.
Over this period, a lot has happened that has shaped bond yields. We’ve used a Flourish story to break it down, putting each event in its historical context.
Want to focus on the here and now? Go to the last slide to get up to speed on the recent happenings. It’s all about making data storytelling as simple and engaging as possible.
With annotations, you can easily highlight major events, like the birth of the euro area, the worldwide financial meltdown, or the eurozone crisis. Simple annotations let you turn data into a captivating narrative.
Uncover patterns with heatmaps
Are you struggling with a complex dataset? Need to spot patterns? A heatmap might just be the right choice for you.
Heatmaps excel in revealing patterns, trends, and correlations through intuitive color coding. In financial contexts, they can highlight areas of high and low performance, risk, or activity.
They’re especially great at highlighting trends and correlations that might be hiding in raw data. Seasonal trends, regional performance variations, or links between financial indicators – heatmaps bring them to light.
Take a look at the rollercoaster ride of house prices in America’s biggest cities below, visualized with our Heatmap template.
We can immediately spot the impact of the financial crisis in 2006, marked by dark red cells. Equally, the increase in house prices following Covid jumps out.
Additionally, add annotations to explain the trends in the data. We have added annotations marking the global financial crisis in 2007 and Covid-19 in 2020.
Dive deep with detailed tables
Tables are ideal for presenting detailed, granular financial data. They allow users to view precise values, making them suitable for financial statements, balance sheets, and other reports where exact numbers are crucial.
They’re great for comparing different variables across categories. Lay out your data in rows and columns and voila – you’ve got a quick way to spot trends, similarities, and differences.
And with Flourish, you’re not just stuck with a standard table. You’ve got loads of customization options. Highlight important data, use conditional formatting to make key figures pop, and sort to focus on the data that matters to you.
In the table below, we are showing world economic growth projections, broken down into different regions and countries. Add images, icons, and even emojis to find countries at a glance or highlight an entire row.
But why stop there? Bring your data to life with mini bar and line charts in Flourish. It’s not just about seeing the numbers, it’s about understanding the trends. Adding sparklines, we can easily spot which countries are projected to grow faster or slower.
Explore relationships with scatter plots
Another essential tool for visualizing financial data are scatter plots, providing a clear and intuitive way to understand relationships between variables.
Scatter plots are excellent for identifying relationships between two variables. They’re fantastic for spotting patterns, like links between a company’s earnings and its stock price, or interest rates and the value of bonds.
And, they also make it easy to spot outliers – which can be crucial for understanding anomalies, assessing risk, and making informed decisions.
With Flourish, enhancing scatter plots is a breeze. Hover over points for more details, add dynamic filters, and more. Get ready to tell your data story with confidence!
The scatter plot below puts the 2023 regional bank crisis into context. The dots show bank failures since 2000 and are sized by their assets.
Using this type of data visualization, we can clearly see that there were multiple bank failures around 2010 – but that recent failures have been bigger in size.
Use annotations to point out the biggest banks or draw attention to important data points.
Discover insights with our Data Explorer template
Uncover the magic of your datasets with our premium Data Explorer template. You’ll be creating rich interactive visualizations of datasets containing multiple metrics. It’s great for finding the stories in a dataset – and for letting your audience explore the data further.
In our example below, we take a look a the members of the S&P 500, the largest listed stocks in the US.
Using the Data Explorer template, you can seamlessly switch between different views of the same data set – from bubbles showing the value of each stock to beeswarms illustrating price changes.
Use color to draw attention to data points, such as the importance of the technology sector.
Add excitement with racing line charts
Racing line charts bring your financial data to life, showing off the ups, downs, and all the exciting twists and turns in between. And the best part? They’re easy to make with Flourish!
Showing the dynamic progression of data points helps to quickly identify how financial metrics, such as stock prices, revenues, or market indices, change over specific periods.
A line chart race turns financial data into a compelling visual story. The motion captures viewers’ attention and makes complex data more accessible and engaging. This is particularly useful for presentations and reports where you want to keep your audience engaged.
They are ideal for showing performance rankings over time. In our example below, illustrating the US debt ceiling since 1972 and showing when the US has repeatedly run into the congressionally mandated limit on borrowing, often leading to disruption, including government shutdowns.
Engage users with interactive SVGs
Do you have the perfect static graphic but you don’t know how to bring interaction and responsiveness to it? Look no further! With our premium Interactive SVG template, you can easily make any SVG file interactive and clickable.
Take a static image or infographic – like the investment process below – and make it more engaging by giving the user the option to click on layers to reveal more information or loop through the steps with an autoplaying story.
Try it out in our example – click on a step in the investment process to reveal more information. And read our blog to discover the unlimited possibilities this template offers.
Uncover regional insights with maps
With maps, you can go for a deep dive into the geographical aspects of your data and uncover new insights.
Say you’re running a business spread across different regions – with a map, you can easily visualize your sales, revenue, or market penetration across these areas. It’s like shining a spotlight on the regions that are really driving your revenue.
You can also spot regional trends, figure out consumer preferences, and discover untapped market opportunities. Want to see how geopolitical events are impacting global trade through shipping routes? The map will show you.
We have visualized the main global trade shipping routes as lines and used IMF data to show the latest volumes as points. Our Projection Map and 3D Map template both let you add custom line layers – read more about it in our blog.
When hovering over a point, you’ll spot that we have embedded charts in our popups to give even more context. Hover over the Suez Canal and Cape of Good Hope to spot the traffic avoiding the Red Sea route.
Users can zoom in and out, hover over ports to get detailed data, and even see a breakdown of the shipping volumes over time. All these elements make the map more engaging and informative.
We’ve done it! We covered key Flourish templates to bring your financial data to life. From line charts to interactive maps, each template offers unique benefits for presenting financial information in a more engaging and insightful way.
By leveraging these visualization techniques, you can transform complex financial data into compelling visuals that tell a clear and impactful story.
So, what are you waiting for? Start exploring these templates today and unlock the full potential of your financial data. Happy visualizing!